Posts Tagged ‘richard noble’

A rendering shows the Bloodhound SSC as it races from 0 to 1,000 mph in just 42 seconds.

When RAF fighter pilot Andy Green hits the “start” button on the new Bloodhound SSC, he’ll fire up a 550-horsepower V-8 borrowed from the Jaguar F-Type sports car. But it will take a lot more than that to get the Bloodhound moving.

The big V-8 is simply there to pump fuel into the 42-foot-long, pencil-shaped Bloodhound’s EJ200 jet engine. When Green opens the throttle up, he will quickly be thrust deep into his cushioned seat as the jet, developed for the Eurofighter, quickly hits about 300 mph. But at that point, it’s only warming up.

A Real Blast!

At that point, a cluster of hybrid solid/liquid rockets will ignite, and if all goes according to plan, Andy Green will soon be moving at 1,000 miles per hour, or nearly a third faster than the land speed record he set in 1997, when he piloted the Thrust SSC to 763 mph, becoming the first man to ever drive through the sound barrier.

A four-wheeled turducken? The Bloodhound will use a Cosworth F1 engine, a fighter jet engine and a rocket, all to hit 1000 mph.

Few things on the road are faster than a Formula One race car, so it’s probably no surprise that the team developing the Bloodhound turned to Cosworth for help when they laid out plans to set a land speed record of 1000 miles per hour.

But the modified F1 engine the British racing supplier plans to provide is only one piece of the puzzle the Bloodhound team has to solve before setting out to go where no four-wheeled vehicle has ever gone before. The Cosworth engine won’t even be connected to those specially-designed metal wheels.

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Unlike previous record speed setters, the Bloodhound will use two primary sources of propulsion: a 12-foot-long rocket and a jet engine borrowed from the European fighter, the Typhoon. The Cosworth F1 engine will be needed, it turns out, to pump nearly a metric ton of fuel into the Falcon rocket engine.

With Bloodhound set to make its attempt on the land speed record in late 2012 or early 2013, testing of its propulsion package is about to begin. Yet there are still a variety of unknowns that the development team, led by long-time speed king Richard Noble, have yet to address – such as what it’s like to pair up both a rocket and a jet engine on a single, wheeled vehicle.